Charter School Listens to the Community: Grade Configuration Change...
We are proud to announce our progress in making Finger Lakes Academy: A Classical Charter School a reality.
After careful consideration, analysis, and discussion, our board has decided to revise our original grade configuration. We now propose to open Fall 2016 as a K-2 school, growing to a K-6 by 2020.
The following explains our decision:
1. Analysis of our community support showed a large percentage of potential applicants in the primary grades (K-2).
2. Most of the school districts' concerns about our charter are financially based. Serving a smaller number of students would address this by substantially reducing the fiscal impact to each school district, while still satisfying our overall goal of offering a classical public school choice to Finger Lakes families.
3. We met with several founders of successful charter schools and all gave us strong recommendations to revise our original grade configuration to align with community interest in the younger grades. The initial focus on grades K-2 maximizes charter realization and longevity as we plan towards the eventual inclusion of intermediate and middle school grades which aligns with our mission.
Therefore, we will propose to open Finger Lakes Academy in the Fall of 2016 with two Kindergarten classes and one each of first and second grade the first year, expanding annually after that.
Our classical education will follow a traditional approach that emphasizes intellectual rigor and excellence in literature, art, music, and moral character. Explicit phonics reading instruction will be employed instead of a whole language (sight word) approach. The 47 spelling rules will be taught, the 71 letter combinations will be studied, and the sound-symbol relationships will be explained. Teacher-made lesson plans, cursive writing, a heavy grammar concentration, K-5 Spanish, and Grades 6-9 Latin will be important parts of our curriculum.
As always, we would like to hear from parents interested in enrolling their children in the school via email.
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Please SHARE THIS EMAIL with anyone you feel has an interest in bringing a classical charter school to the Finger Lakes area or enrolling their children. See below to sign your email up to receive all the charter school updates. You may also email me at donnambennett@att.net (or just reply to this email) with letters of support for the school. Thank you again for your interest in public school choice in our area.
This link takes you to the Canandaigua Connected home page where you "sign up for our FREE Enewsletter" then check the box next to "Finger Lakes Academy: A Classical Charter School". Please forward to other families you think may be interested.
